Gnome 3, multiple monitors and desktops

Today I tried to install Debian Wheezy on a Lenovo X220, in preparation for the upcoming release.

It generally went well, with just a couple of incompatabilities:

the wireless card requires some firmware in non-free

the fan seems to be constantly on at a low speed

Generally though, the install went very smoothly. At that point, I booted up and greeted by the new Gnome 3 desktop, which is where my troubles started. It seems that the fonts are fairly poorly rendered, either far too small or far too large. There doesn’t appear to be any way of changing workspaces using the keyboard. [edit: ctrl+alt+arrows works] Using a second screen placed above the first produces some… interesting effects with moving windows around, as can be seen at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yTr12Q7CYU.

The result is that I’ve gone back to using XFCE. It seems to actually work well, which is kinda important when trying to be productive.

That is, the external monitor is on the right side, separate from workspaces, and workspaces are positioned below each other on the left side. If you put your external monitor above the built-in one, you might just end up confusing GNOME 3’s workspace management.

you can just stick with GNOME2 which still works fine (and has some features that i miss on xfce). Only because the gnome devs decided to make gnome3 names clash with gnome2 names (thanks guys), someone had to grab all the code, and rename it all to MATE.

I use my ext monitor above my laptop screen (physically that is), I hadn’t thought about it before but I could appreciate that if you used two screens side-by-side then the workspace management being horizontal could be confusing. It’s a shame that, identifying that, they’ve just swapped confusing for one group of people for confusing for the other, rather than try and resolve the problem. Are we vertically-stacked screen people that unusual? I mean, it rather follows HCI guidelines (ext display at eye-level, laptop keyboard at elbow-level)